Drug Search Engine for Confusable Drug Names

Drug name confusion accounts for 15-25% of all reported medication errors in the US and about 3.9 million "wrong drug" errors per year in US outpatient pharmacies. Only some confusable drug names has been reported while most of them are hidden. This project studies the confusability among drugs. In this project, a drug name search engine was developped to retrieve drug names which have high confusability with respect to a given query drug and implemented various ranking methods which measure the confusability of a query drug with all existing drugs in the databases in terms of their phonemic and orthographic similarities. The drug name search engine is available for demo: http://dolphin.cs.uic.edu:8080/DrugSearch/